Celebrating Asian Contributions to Communication for Development

A forthcoming chapter in a book celebrates the Asian contributions to Communication for Development (ComDev). The chapter highlights seven of these contributions in order to demonstrate the fundamental concerns that drive the agenda, processes, and partnerships in the field.

The seven contributions of Asian scholars, practitioners, and community partners to ComDev which have been expounded in the chapter include: schools of thought, offering of professional degrees, participatory planning, inclusive rural communication services, community communication, capacitation, evaluative framework for capacity building, knowledge exchange, and mainstreaming devcom in state governance. The specific attributes of these contributions are examined in the chapter and are considered in retrospective so that students of society will come to appreciate the fundamental aspects of theory and practice of the discipline.

Such contributions have been acknowledged as products of experiments done in the 1940s and 1950s in Asia that made use of media and communication process in promoting sustainable development. These are pieces of evidence that there is a different way of thinking about and doing development beyond what the Western views offer. As its history continues to unfold, ComDev Asian style continues to build up its body of knowledge and practice. Moreover, it challenges the modernist development approaches being promoted by international development institutions that seem to assume that everything is all about social and behavior change communication.